Asus X205TA hardware support in Ubuntu

[Kyle_Gibson]

Sounds good! Now, I read through page 34 and it said that Ubuntu and it's derivatives will fail when it comes to installing grub. Will this happen with the file I downloaded from you?

Edit: Just finished the installation and everything looks to be running just fine! I'm sure i'll be lurking and posting more as I start to play with this thing. I appreciate all of your help

[harryharryharry]

There were some bootloader(grub) problems with previous ubuntu versions, but it seems to be sorted out as of 16.04. If someone wants to install an older ubuntu version (which is mosty relevant for distros based on ubuntu, like elementary OS - because they are always lagging behind a bit) they need to install grub manually with the right flag (namely --target=i386-efi).

Good job on finishing the installation, looks like it wasn't that hard after all

[Kyle_Gibson]

Thanks! Yes, it wasn't hard after all thanks to you. Now the hard part is learning linux! I'll report back when I have that sound issue figured out .

Thanks again for your time.

[ZannaStar]

@rose-anna-bleasdale Thanks for the feedback about the wifi issue in liveusb environment. I cant reproduce the issue however (can you connect when you add the ssid&wpa-code manually in Network Manager ?) If more people are reporting this, maybe I should incorporate a function in the script so people can load their own brcmfmac43340-sdio.bin & brcmfmac43340-sdio.txt into the iso.

I tried again, and it does indeed work if I 'edit connections' and put the details in that way, so, all is good = )

[harryharryharry]

@Kyle_Gibson
Oh I forgot to mention you need to add the boot parameter intel_idle.max_cstate=1 in /etc/default/grub between the quotes after GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=
If you don't the laptop will freeze from time to time.

you can run

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

to edit the file with the text-editor nano, when you're done editing hit ctrl+O and enter to save. then hit ctrl+X to quit the editor.

after that run

sudo update-grub

to write the changes you've made in /etc/default/grub to /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Now after a reboot the laptop will use the added boot parameter. You can check if you're using the boot parameter by running

cat /proc/cmdline

@rose-anna-bleasdale Good to hear, that saves me a lot of trial and error with editing the script. Thanks again for the feedback !

[Kyle_Gibson]

@harryharryharry Yeah I read through your readme file because I was having constant freezes this morning. Took some digging but I found exactly where to place it and the freezes are all gone. I didn't see your comment and decided to try to remedy it myself. Also for what it's worth, the liveusb environment allowed me to connect to WIFI right away.

[ZannaStar]

@harryharyharry

I was excited to try your script, so I downloaded Ubuntu GNOME iso to test it out. When I run the script, I get 'function not found' at line 49 which is 'function checkroot {' So, I just blithely deleted that whole section & the other instance of 'checkroot' at the end to see if it would work (and remembered to sudo it) and now I get the same error at the next function checkfreespace. Since I know I have enough free space and in fact

df -hk .|tail -n1|awk '{print $4}'

returns 16471584 at this location... I went ahead and deleted that section too, and as you can guess by now it just complains about the next function... Quite possibly this is caused by some superstupid thing I did, but in any case, I am more than happy to tinker with it if it is any help

(Edit: it did create a tmp.*something* directory each time I tried it though)

[harryharryharry]

I sent you a PM so we can figure it out. If btw the message was

sudo ./x205ta-iso2zip.sh: line 44: $1: unbound variable

That means the script didn't find the argument it needs to continue
for example running

running

sudo ./x205ta-iso2zip.sh

results in

sudo ./x205ta-iso2zip.sh: line 44: $1: unbound variable

but running

sudo ./x205ta-iso2zip.sh ubuntu.iso #The previously missing argument

will (hopefully) result in running the script as it was intended

[onetefo]

Thanks @KemyLand and @ekyo for your answers!
I've decided to wait for compile a custom kernel until @ekyo figured out which are the minimal .config changes to avoid the slowdown behavior, given that this is my first reason to migrate to a custom kernel (if you don't mind @ekyo to work for both of us!). So please tell me in a couple of days if you don't experiment any more issues.

Hi tefo.cirigliano,

(sorry for my bad english)
Agree, i used my 701 since i bought the x205ta. A shame we have to do this, but on an other side that's please me, i like to search and make things works...

EEE 701 rocks! 8 years later it works like the first day.

I'm running arch too, and i think i had the exactly same issues. With stock kernel from arch, or compiled ones.
Restarting the login manager (slim in my case) fixed the slowdown problem, can you try ?

I'd try it to restore the system. But it is still very annoying, isn't it?

I searched but i had no luck finding precisely what were going on : iotop, htop, and all other utilities show no problem.
Slowdown intensity could vary, making in some cases the laptop unusable, i was forced to restarting slim.
I noticed that there was no performance slowdown, but only massive display slowdown : with a silent shell script that require no display, there's no incidence on the work time.
If you force updating display with clicking with touchpad for exemple, you can see it works.

Yes! I've noticed that too.

So... i recently compiled 4.6 with custom config and... no more slowdowns ! Every thing OK, since 3 days. Before that slowdows occured often.
On addition, i made mkinitcpio changes, to make initrd much smaller (improve boot time). Maybe that too can be the solution to this problem but i doubt, 1rst hypothesis is more probable.

In the next days, i will recompile that 4.6 kernel with less options in config. To make a minimal one on a side for my use (which is my primary goal), and to isolate the config option that permit the disparition on that awful slowdown. I will post here the results of my tests.

Have you tried the 4.6 stock kernel from arch repositories?

If you want to try yourself, here is the ressources i use :

- a script to automate fetching , downloading, compiling and install of the kernel : http://*******.us/SYED
- a config (if you use the script above, rename it to ./4.6/config_4.6 ) : http://*******.us/ZbHN

Compile needs 1.5Go, and take nearly an hour on my x205ta. Boot time (my primary goal boot time and optimization) is : 2.870s (kernel) + 4.282s (userspace) )

After ends the compiling, is it possible to erase the 1.5GB?

Happy hacking,
ekyo

edit : i forgot for your 2nd issue, random hangs on boot (sometime at login manager, sometime right after login when my openbox was opening): no issue so far again since i changed /dev/mmcblk0p* by uuid in fstab. No explications why. It just worked.

Awesome! Could you please extend this explanation? What should I change?

[MisterBiro]

@harryharyharry

I was excited to try your script, so I downloaded Ubuntu GNOME iso to test it out. When I run the script, I get 'function not found' at line 49 which is 'function checkroot {' So, I just blithely deleted that whole section & the other instance of 'checkroot' at the end to see if it would work (and remembered to sudo it) and now I get the same error at the next function checkfreespace. Since I know I have enough free space and in fact

df -hk .|tail -n1|awk '{print $4}'

returns 16471584 at this location... I went ahead and deleted that section too, and as you can guess by now it just complains about the next function... Quite possibly this is caused by some superstupid thing I did, but in any case, I am more than happy to tinker with it if it is any help

(Edit: it did create a tmp.*something* directory each time I tried it though)

@harryharryharry, @rose-anna-bleasdale:

Try replacing:

#!/bin/sh

with

#!/bin/bash

At the top of the script.